Every book of travel in the library was pressed into my service, and I should most certainly have run away to sea if we had lived in a seaport. My son inherits my taste. He chose the navy for his profession long ere he saw the sea. May he do honour to his choice!
However, in the end the love of poetry and appreciation of its beauty awoke in me. The first spark of passion that fired my heart and imagination was kindled by Virgil’s magnificent epic, and I well remember how my voice broke as I tried to construe aloud the fourth book of the Æneid. One day, stumbling along, I came to the passage where Dido—the presents of Æneas heaped around her—gives up her life upon the funeral pyre; the agony of the dying queen, the cries of her sister, her nurse, her women; the horror of that scene that struck pity even to the hearts of the Immortals, all rose so vividly before me that my lips trembled, my words came more and more indistinctly, and at the line—
“Quæsivit cœlo lucem ingemuitque reperta,”
I stopped dead.
Then my dear father’s delicate tact stepped in. Apparently noticing nothing, he said, gently:
“That will do for to-day, my boy; I am tired.”
And I tore away to give vent to my Virgilian misery unmolested.
II
ESTELLE
Will it be credited that when I was only twelve years old, and even before I fell under the spell of music, I became the victim of that cruel passion so well described by the Mantuan?
My mother’s father, who bore a name immortalised by Scott—Marmion—lived at Meylan, about seven miles from Grenoble. This district, with its scattered hamlets, the valley of the winding Isère, the Dauphiny mountains that here join a spur of the Alps, is one of the most romantic spots I know. Here my mother, my sisters, and I usually passed three weeks towards the end of summer.